Price held more clout than insurers' network and brand when consumers chose health plans on the individual ACA exchanges, according to recent Leavitt Partners study.
Study authors evaluated the importance of insurers' price, network size and brand on consumers' health plan purchases for coverage sold during the first three years of the exchanges. Researchers analyzed enrollment and insurer data for 10 states operating their own exchanges between 2014 and 2016. The authors examined pricing data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Health Insurance Exchange Compare dataset and focused on the most commonly purchased silver plans.
While brand and percent of the population eligible for plans acted as indicators of consumers' choice in 2014 and 2015, price represented the most significant influencer of plan selection. This is the same in 2016, although researchers excluded network size from its 2016 analysis due to lack of available data.
"With so little clarity about the dynamics currently driving the healthcare marketplaces, these findings can help policymakers and business leaders understand what shapes consumer behavior as they consider decisions about the future," the study's authors concluded.